Legacy Level 50 on All Servers

I said at the start of the year that it was going to happen this season, and it has indeed happened: I'm now legacy level 50 on all servers. The truly amazing thing is that I actually managed to capture the moment it happened on both Tulak Hord and Leviathan, when I'd previously failed to do so on my four other legacies. 

Tulak Hord was the first across the finish line, about three weeks ago. The big ding happened after I completed a round of CZ-198 dailies.

Leviathan was about one legacy level behind, so it made sense that it didn't tick over until this week. In this case it happened at the end of a random master mode flashpoint I'd queued for because it was a seasons objective. I got into a Battle of Rishi run that was very smooth and quick.

As hinted at before, I think my next goal for the other servers will be to get one of every class levelled and through the class story. Not something I expect to achieve any time soon or on any predictable timeline really, but I'm just talking about it as a vague thing to strive towards over time. As it stands, I need to create a bunch more alts first as I don't even have one of every class on every server yet. I'm not missing that many though, and I already created a few new alts this week to start making some progress towards this new goal.

Legacy Level 50 on Satele Shan

Back in September I posted about hitting legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla, and at the end of that post I noted about the three remaining servers where I hadn't maxed out my legacy yet that "I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year." What I didn't expect when I said that I would ding 50 on Satele Shan literally on New Year's Day!

It basically managed to juuust get in there at the end of the season, as I'd literally just completed my one hundredth weekly season objective and was just doing a couple more quests to hit the character's personal Conquest target when the "legacy level up" pop-up appeared. I actually paused for a moment and went "wait, what legacy level am I again on here", hovered over the bar and it said 50! I hadn't realised I'd been that close already!

Anyway, that's another one off the list. I double-checked The Leviathan and Tulak Hord now and I'm 47 and 48 there respectively, but I'm also fully done with the season, so my alts there will be getting a bit of a break over the next few weeks. Definitely something to keep an eye on next season though!

Once I'm legacy level 50 everywhere, I guess hitting legendary on all servers could be my next long-term goal. I'd definitely post about that on reddit if I ever got it, as while I surely wouldn't be the first person to ever do it, it's still gotta be something extremely rare...

Either way I'd have quite a way to go to that one on most servers, as I've only actually completed one class story on Satele Shan even at legacy level 50, just like it was on Star Forge when I maxed out there.

Legacy Level 50 on Shae Vizla

Last year in June I made a post to commemorate the milestone of hitting legacy level 50 on Star Forge, making it the second server on which I achieved this feat. I said I'd post again when I achieved the same on another server, so... here we are!

I hit legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla this weekend, after completing the featured veteran flashpoint of the week for Galactic Seasons. And yes, I failed to get a screenshot of it once again, though I wasn't completely oblivious to the event this time. I was in fact very aware that I was getting close, but to be honest the flashpoint had been a bit unpleasant from my perspective, so that distracted me... When we clicked the console at the end to trigger completion, I got about ten different message pop-ups about achievements, Conquest and seasonal progression, and the couple of seconds it took me to realise "oh snap, I also dinged legacy level 50; I should take a screenshot" were too much of a delay, as the relevant text had already faded from my screen again.

You may be wondering how my legacy on Shae Vizla ended up getting ahead of Satele Shan, the Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where I've been playing for longer, and the answer is simply that I played on SV pretty intensely for a few months when it first came out, which ended up giving me a boost. It's also the secondary server where I've completed the largest number of class stories, with that number currently sitting at four (warrior, consular, trooper and bounty hunter).

That said, these days it doesn't really get any extra play time compared to the other servers on which I primarily play for Galactic Seasons. It does always make me a bit sad to remember how bustling and alive the Shae Vizla server was at its launch compared to how it is now. This Sunday it occurred to me to work my way through the levels in /who (so typing "/who 1-9", "/who 10-19" etc. in quick succession) and around 8pm Sydney time, what I would expect to be prime time for the APAC region, there were only a little over 100 people online on Imp side. Even if we're generous and assume about the same amount of activity on Republic side, 200 concurrent players is not a lot for an official SWTOR server. Maybe there are other times of day when it's busier if the population is still skewed towards including as many US and EU players as there seemed to be at launch, but it can't be that much better I reckon.

Anyway! The other three servers on which I haven't hit legacy level 50 yet are not that far off either at this point - I believe they are all around legacy level 45 or so. I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year.

(This Year) I Love the Night Life

When Nar Shaddaa Nightlife was mentioned in May's dev stream, I was grousing that they didn't address the one thing I cared about in relation to that event - whether they were finally making the casino chips a legacy-wide currency. And to be honest... I still don't know why they weren't shouting this from the rooftops, but this past week, one day before the event began, they announced that the chips were becoming legacy-bound after all - halfway down the page in a pretty long article.

As it turns out, this change wasn't without hiccups: Immediately after launch, it turned out that acquisition of any new chips was apparently causing all your old chips to be deleted, which led to an emergency server shutdown and quick fix, but once that had been handled, I was excited to log in and cycle through all my characters to get a tally of how many chips I had. It took a while, mostly because once I got to logging through them all, I also felt the need to check their mail, claim the latest set of freebies they'd received etc. but in the end I was left with what I felt was a pretty decent amount.

Fortunately the days when too many free chips would just make me feel anxious are long gone (the max bet machines are a thing now after all), and I've been happy to just do a few spins per day for the Conquest points. I'm pleased that now that the chips are legacy-bound, this is much easier than it used to be, when I'd have to log back and forth between different characters all the time just to find who still had several different kinds of chips left.

There aren't any particular prizes I'm chasing this time around, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to collect some new mounts and pets on different characters. 

Legacy-wide DvL Tokens and More

Yesterday's patch 7.5.1b was an interesting one despite being only a minor patch. For one thing, it changed dark and light side tokens from being character-bound currencies to legacy-wide. It seems the cynicism I expressed about the chances of this happening a few weeks ago was unwarranted, though I do still wonder why converting the Soovada slot machine chips to a legacy currency would be such a big deal but they were able to convert the DvL tokens within a couple of weeks.

Maybe it's simply the difference between a clean and a "sloppy" implementation, as we weren't able to log in and find all our tokens in one place yesterday, but it was necessary to manually log into every single character that had tokens to get them added to the total (which would let you go over the cap by the way, in case anyone was worried). I finished my rounds of alt-hopping with a total of 1,310 tokens.

For fun, I'd held a little contest on my guild Discord beforehand, asking people to guess what my total was going to be after the patch. One guildie actually managed to guess this exact number!

Of course I then had the problem of what to do with all this currency, since I wanted to get back down to below the cap, or else I wasn't going to be able to earn any more tokens from boss kills. Even though the devs added some more items to the vendors, there wasn't really anything I was super keen on. Still, I ended up buying eight of the armour sets as well as a couple of the weapons.

That still left me with more than 300 light side tokens, at which point I just gave up and bought a bunch of speeders to throw into my legacy cargo bay. A lot of my more frequently-played characters already had all of these from back in the day, when the tokens were very easy to earn and I was constantly trying to find ways to avoid bumping up against the cap, but I'm sure I'll find some toons that can actually use them.

It's a good thing I didn't rely on these vendor rewards for motivation to take part in world boss kills this season...

One of my inquisitors trying to decide whether the Dread Harbinger set from the vendor works for her.

There were a few other interesting patch items as well though. For example it was announced that Galactic Season 7's end date, which was originally meant to be the 7th of January, was pushed back to February 18th. I have no issues with that, and the official justification was to give players more time to finish the season without having to be online all the time during the holiday period. It does make me wonder though whether they're behind schedule in some way in terms of content production, seeing how we're supposed to have this ongoing cadence of 7.x patches with story updates and 7.x.1 patches with Galactic Seasons.

Finally, one patch note that seemed to inspire a (to me) surprising amount of anger on reddit was this one:

Players must now defeat the security cannons in the Hammer Station Flashpoint in order to disengage the bridge in Section Zero.

For anyone who doesn't know what this is about, Hammer Station is generally considered the easiest/fastest of all flashpoints and therefore very popular with people who just want to farm flashpoint currency quickly. People's attempts to optimise this speed-running have included not fighting a pair of champion turrets at a bridge near the end of the flashpoint - the "popular" strategy was to just run past them, which would keep you in combat until the end of the flashpoint.

The upside of this was that it would save you about a minute of combat time. The downside was that being stuck in combat meant being unable to regenerate health, so if your group didn't have a healer and/or included low-level characters without a lot of cooldowns, people would sometimes die during the last few trash packs before the last boss (the boss himself is surrounded by kolto stations). Also, being stuck in combat prevents you from exiting the flashpoint, so it was required to suicide-jump off the ledge behind the boss after killing him to get out of combat again.

I think it's fairly obvious from this description that this was never a good risk-reward trade-off in a pug. It was basically the same problem we used to have in Athiss with that damn ledge jump, where people would rather spend five minutes waiting for everyone to climb up a ledge than spend thirty seconds killing two easy mob packs (and which was thankfully patched out in 7.4). Only in this instance they'd rather risk getting some of their group mates killed as well as give everyone a repair bill rather than kill two mobs.

So while reddit may be mad, most people I've talked to are actually glad about this fix, and so am I. Now if they could do something about the craziness of players attempting to run past/skip all the trash leading to the first boss as well... I'm just continually saddened by the weird and degenerate gameplay that has infested what I once used to think of as a nice little starter flashpoint.

Lessons Learned from Training Bessi

As of about a week ago, I'm the proud owner of a permanent basilisk droid companion! Like I said in my last post about B3-S1, I was actually surprised by how enjoyable I ended up finding the process, when I was originally very much against the idea of being given a reason to do the same old daily zones yet again for the umpteenth time.

However, there are definitely a few things I learned along the way that I kind of wish I had known sooner. Heck, this one sentence from my previous post contains two misconceptions in one: "[T]here are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week." Since I want other people to be able to avoid the mistakes I made, let me break it down for you:

1. Bessi's time is not precious

In that previous post, I made it sound like it was really easy to hit the weekly cap on all the Bessi-related currencies within only two hours, but that was on a stealther and knowing my way around. I almost took a certain pride in making efficient use of my "Bessi-time" because I figured it was the most precious resource in the whole endeavour. Can't make any progress with Bessi if you're not allowed to have her out, can you?

This turned out to be very wrong for two reasons: First off, the memory chips you need to spend to activate Bessi for an hour are extremely easy to get. You get several for free from the terminal in Lane's lab every week, and the collected research containers also have a random chance of containing extra memory chips. So I soon found myself bumping up against the real limiting factors: training modules and prototype data.

The latter isn't that hard to get but is required in higher and higher numbers as you go up in levels, and also serves as currency for buying training modules for specific planets from the vendor. Training modules aren't exactly rare per se either, but since it's random what modules you'll get granted for free and they can send you to 14 different planets, it's possible for module RNG a.k.a. "just not getting enough of the one you actually need" to be a real blocker.

Oh, and guess what gives you two free training modules every time? Feeding Bessi a memory chip! So I went from trying to be super efficient with her time in the early levels and treating memory chips as extremely precious, to actively feeding her the things all day without even using Bessi for anything (you can use up more memory chips before the timer for the last one has actually run out by dismissing Bessi in Lane's Lab and then initiating the "conversation" with her while she's lying in her dedicated spot).

2. You don't have to stop after you've maxed out your currencies for the week

The other misconception I expressed in that earlier quote was that maxing out my Bessi-related currencies for the week meant that I was done and that there was nothing else left to do. In reality, you can keep doing training modules for as long as you have any. The collected research you get as a reward is a container, so you can simply stash those in your cargo bay to immediately have a leg up on your weekly progress for the next reset. You don't have to worry about accidentally wasting them either, as the game won't even let you open them if you're already maxed out on all the currencies contained within.

Do take care though with which training modules you use up every week, because...

3. It pays off to know which training modules are used at which level

I'm usually someone who prefers exploring things for myself, only resorting to guides when I get stuck, but with Bessi, having at least a little bit of knowledge in advance definitely pays off. Specifically, what you should know is that at the higher levels, you'll have to complete training modules in specific daily areas to progress. These are:

Level 5: Black Hole, CZ-198, Iokath
Level 6: Onderon, Oricon, Ruhnuk
Level 8: Kessan's Landing, Ossus, Yavin IV
Level 9: Makeb, Manaan, Section X

Mek-Sha and Rishi are not required for any specific levels.

What this means is that when you pick which training modules to do in a given week, keep in mind what's coming up next and don't use up the ones you're about to need at the next level! I don't remember the exact details, but I think I did a bunch of Black Hole and CZ-198 modules at level four because hey! They are really easy daily areas! And then I levelled up and groaned when I saw that I'd just used up what was required for the next level, when I could have done level four with any old module.

4. You don't get credit for everything you should get credit for

Maybe that'll be fixed one day, but as it stands, there are some slight bugs with the training module missions. That you need to actually have Bessi out and in the role she's training for when you complete a mission is logical enough, but other restrictions... not so much. For example I was initially under the impression that the bonus missions that ask you to do a heroic don't give you anything, because they only seem to grant you your reward if the heroic is completed before the main mission (as opposed to at the same time). So if your main objective says to complete two missions, and you do a normal daily first and a heroic second, the heroic doesn't count for the bonus in my experience, meaning you need to make sure to always do any heroics first if you want to get credit for the bonus. The collected research you get from these bonus missions is actually quite good as it contains lots of prototype data plus a little bit of several of the other types.

Oh, and Makeb heroics are just totally screwed up in terms of credit. I found this forum post helpful for pointing out several of the missions from the terminal that don't count towards training Bessi. GSI missions don't work either in case you're wondering.

5. Bonus tip:

Not something "I wish I'd known" because I did find out about it in time, but at level 10 you're asked to have Bessi use her abilities in every role 500 times. That is a lot. By the time I had done everything else required at that level, I still needed about 300 more ability uses in each role. Fortunately, for tank and dps, you can just sic Bessi on a training dummy and go AFK for a while. For her to practice healing, I opted to engage a champion mob on Nar Shaddaa and let him punch me in the face for a while. This requires a little bit of attention, but not that much and at least it's kind of amusing (even if I had to do it several times over, because even with me practically doing no dps to him, Bessi's piddly heal-dps would eventually kill him).

Adventuring With Bessi

There's one major feature of patch 7.5 that I still haven't written about here yet: Bessi the Basilisk Droid! To be honest, I did the introductory quest line during the first week and then decided to nope right out of the whole system for the first month - it was all dailies and I was already doing the new spring event on ALL the characters; there's only so much daily-running I can take. However, I always intended to get back to Bessi eventually, so for the past few weeks I've been taking her out on adventures every week.

When Bessi and her new "venture" were first announced, my reaction could basically be summed up in three bullet points:

• Good: a companion with a meaningful story and gameplay behind it!
• Bad: another incentive to do the same old daily areas yet again!
• Confusing: why do we need a new system for this?

I feel like seeing the system in action only really gave me a partial answer to the last question. It has its own snazzy UI of course, but at its core it's still just a bunch of quests and achievements? My best guess is that the whole thing is legacy-wide in a way that the current achievement system wouldn't quite have been able to support or something...

As a system, I'm honestly feeling a bit ambivalent about it, but it might be that the devs are still working out some kinks. For example I saw people complain a lot about mission RNG from level five onwards (before I'd gotten there myself) and this was addressed pretty quickly with a new option to unlock specific missions via currency on a vendor.

For me, where I'm at right now, there are mainly two things that still seem a little unrefined to me: one is that even though the system was advertised as legacy-wide, all the training module missions are character-bound, which makes it kind of unappealing to ever go on an alt, as you'll keep earning new missions on the same character, and switching to an alt would require you to pay extra to unlock training missions on a different character, when what you really want to do is save your precious currency for actual advancement.

The other thing is that it's just... a bit confusing, but in a way that I find hard to articulate. I was actually somewhat reminded of the way I felt about the 7.0 gearing system when Legacy of the Sith came out, which is to say, I kinda got what I needed to do, but if you asked me to explain how it all works, I'd just draw a blank. With Bessi in specific, I can always see the checklist of tasks in the venture window, but I find that I have to keep referring back to it all the time, because I just can't quite keep track and the flow never feels entirely organic to me. I pretty much always complete one task at a time and then have to go "OK, now what".

Bessi herself is incredibly cute though. She's basically a robot dog with a giant, multi-barrelled gun for a face, which sounds bizarre but works somehow. Everything about her design walks a fine line between threatening and adorable. I particularly like her idle sound, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up the first time I heard it because she growls a bit like the T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park, only slightly more robotic. But then you watch her wag her tail while she casts heals on you and you just can't help going "aw"; it's pretty amazing honestly.

Also, and it almost pains me a little to say this, but the daily gameplay loop turned out to be more fun than I expected. It's a bit different in that you have to "rent" Bessi for an hour at a time, so you have an incentive to really dedicate that time slot to nothing but her (logging out pauses the timer so you can take breaks if you want, but my point is you may not want to go off and run a flashpoint halfway through or something).

More interestingly though, we're not being asked to do the weekly mission in each daily area like on pretty much every other occasion, but instead Bessi's training modules require you to do just two daily or heroic missions in a specific daily zone at a time, which makes you think about things like which ones to pick for good synergy and can result in a lot of planet-hopping in a relatively short time. It's just... different.

The one thing that's surprised me is how extremely time-gated the system is. Obviously there was always going to be a limit in terms of how much progress you're allowed to make in a single week, but there are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week. Considering how the resource investment for each level is also increasing over time, the devs clearly weren't kidding when they said that unlocking Bessi's full potential was going to be something that takes a level of real time commitment that not everyone will be willing to make to this system.

How are you getting on with Bessi and what do you think of the new venture system so far?

Legacy Level 50 on Star Forge

The other week I hit an interesting milestone by reaching legacy level 50 on Star Forge. While I have characters on all servers, I've never done a transfer between any of them, so my legacy levels are entirely independent of each other and purely a reflection of how much time I've spent playing on that specific server.

It's not really a surprise that Star Forge was the first secondary server on which I maxed out my legacy, considering that Shintar the Cathar trooper, created in 2016, was one of my first and most-played alts created on a different server than my home.

Still, at the same time it's kind of funny to think that it took me eight years of real time to get there, and to consider just how little in terms of story content I got done in all that time. When I hit legacy level 50 on The Red Eclipse (which would eventually get merged into Darth Malgus), I had only been playing for about ten months and had already completed four out of the eight class stories. On Star Forge I've still only completed one of them! So much legacy experience acquired from random nonsense like running dailies I guess...

Another thing that cracked me up was that I once again failed utterly at actually capturing a screenshot of the big ding, just like I did back in 2012. I'd been well aware that I was sitting at legacy level 49 and was creeping up on 50 but then... I just kinda forgot about it again, and when I realised that the ding had happened without me actually noticing, I checked my achievements just to find that it had actually happened several days ago. Seriously.

Anyway, I know that legacy levels are pretty meaningless, and have been so since forever. I reckon most long-term players have been 50 for so long, they haven't even thought about the concept in years. But to me, it was still an interesting milestone to reach on a second server. I'll probably post again whenever I get there on the other servers, but if I recall correctly, all the others are still only somewhere in the thirties, so it's probably going to be a while.

Patch 7.4.1 Is Here!

It is here, patch 7.4.1, and with it several new features:

• Galactic Season 6
• The first four Date Night missions
• Server transfers to Shae Vizla

I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about all of these in a couple of days, but for today, I'd just like to highlight a few other patch notes that I enjoyed:

A new Character Convenience unlock has been added to Legacy Perks! Once unlocked, players will be able to reach the GTN at any time without needing to travel to the Fleet, their personal ship, various planets or Strongholds!

I can't say that I recall ever wishing for a portable GTN myself, but I think this is a good addition. More legacy perks are always welcome! I could see this being useful to raiders who realise that they don't have a stim on them just as they're about to pull a boss in an operation for example.

Ancient Armaments Added To Daily Login Rewards: Ancient Armaments contain various armor appearances including ones that could not previously be acquired or traded. These armor pieces do not contain stats or mod slots and are intended solely for Outfitter. These armor pieces do have dye slots and can be traded and bought / sold on the GTN. The armor pieces that are available inside of Ancient Armaments are now also available as random world drops.

Now this is probably the biggest patch feature that came as a complete surprise. Joe Stragmalia expanded on the subject on the forums to clarify that this includes hundreds of weapons and over 2000 armor pieces. I'm very curious to see how this addition will shape up in practice.

More outfit choices that you can acquire through gameplay are always a good thing, and I know that there was demand for at least some of these world drops (the reason they were rare was that they would only drop while your character was in a specific level range, and with how fast levelling is nowadays, it was very easy to outlevel even the chance of having them drop). On the other hand though, I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of these old pieces will actually be considered quite ugly by most players, and since they have no stats and can't be vendored, I wouldn't be surprised if the GTN ended up being a bit flooded with them in short order. Again though, more cheap cosmetic options available for credits is not a bad thing.

What I'm curious to see is whether these are all based on world drops or whether other looks that are no longer available otherwise are included as well. I'm thinking of things like old flashpoint armours that I still own on some of my oldest characters, such as the Black Talon Hunter's Body Armor or the Cademimu Sharpshooter set.

Outfits will now be included when characters are transferred between servers.

This is great news but amused me since I just pointed out in February's community round-up post that outfits not transferring was an important thing to consider before transferring to Shae Vizla. As someone who's not planning to do any transfers any time soon, I'm still pleased that next time I'll make a character copy to the PTS, the first thing to do upon logging in won't be staring in horror at my outfit-less character displaying whatever hodgepodge of armour they were actually wearing underneath.

Fixed the Unread Mail UI icon so that it once again properly updates when new Mail is received.

Oh yes please, that only snuck in recently and was quite annoying.

The Mantellian Flutterplume’s name is now spelled correctly.

But... how was it spelled before then? 🤔

Removed a random floating bottle on Dantooine.

Glad to see we're focusing on the important things!

Several Nova Blade pirates on Rishi who were hostile in previously-neutral areas have been asked to calm down a bit.

I think I know which mobs this refers to... I think they were originally added for the Feast of Prosperity story chain? They lurk on the west side of Raider's Cove and I've unintentionally aggroed them (always feeling a bit surprised to be attacked in town) quite a few times.

Added the following to the appropriate mission terminals: [DAILY] Grateful Grazers (Republic), [DAILY] Panther Training (Imperial), [DAILY] Turn the Lights On (Both), [DAILY] Unstable Readings (Both) 

This one surprised me because as I mentioned in my post about Kessan's Landing, I figured placing these missions outside of town was an intentional design choice reminiscent of Yavin IV and Ziost. Did people find these too hard to find?

The Galaxy Map icon will no longer be highlighted for newly created characters that can't access it.

Not that this isn't a good thing... but wasn't this supposed to have been fixed in 7.3.1?

Regeneration Toys will correctly regenerate resources for all origin story and combat style combinations.

Once again, I just wonder which toy/origin story/combat style combination was bugged here. Let me know in the comments if you know!

Anyway, lots of other stuff to look at in game, so I'll get to that for now!

Enjoying the New Server Smell on Shae Vizla

There are about a dozen different MMO-related things I'd like to be doing right now, but I just had to make some time for checking out the launch of the new APAC server. I started by securing my name on a trooper, but then began levelling a Sith warrior instead, simply because one of the weekly seasons objectives was to complete fifteen missions as that origin story. I named her Apacella, which I thought was quite a clever pun for the occasion. In no rush to level up quickly but still keen to play, I made it to level 13 in my first play session.

I got myself invited to Kal's guild on Empire side but also kept general chat open - something I usually don't do - because I wanted to see what people were talking about on the server's first day. There was some silliness going on, but no real toxicity that I could see. Mostly people seemed to be talking about what a strange experience it was to start from scratch again and to have no legacy perks, whether this experience made them miss their legacies or filled them with nostalgia.

I was somewhat ahead of the pack in that sense as I already got to wrestle with that particular sensation early last year, when I started from scratch on Tulak Hord and Leviathan. Still, at this point my legacies on those servers are at least moderately progressed too, so being back to square one on Shae Vizla was certainly a noticeable shift again. Killing that gold k'lor'slug in the blood pool at level nine was a proper life-or-death battle that I only won very barely - same with soloing the Korriban heroics later.

I also had to resist the urge to open my mail initially, since I did not have a stronghold yet that I could travel to and use to dump all my freebies in my legacy cargo hold. I figured that the ancient promotion that granted the Nar Shaddaa stronghold for free to everyone who was a subscriber at the launch of Galactic Strongholds (or something like that) doesn't apply on Shae Vizla, but I did see later on that it showed up as available for free on the stronghold directory; I just had to actually go there and activate it. Either way I opted to sort out my mail and bags once I got to the fleet.

I queued for my first PvP match at level ten, something I'd usually never do because of just how low-level and weak you are that early on... but I figured hey, the server is brand new and we're all low-level and weak, so why not. I certainly didn't feel like I was doing particularly worse than anyone else and it was good fun. I even did some arenas and the matches felt pretty balanced, with no twinks AoE-stunning everyone with grenades and nobody getting salty about losing.

Another thing that was really interesting to me was Conquest. Since there haven't been any fresh servers since launch, I hadn't considered how that system would function on a brand-new server. Since there are no established guilds yet, the Conquest leaderboard is currently completely empty as nobody has the funds to buy a guild ship yet - though even if they did, nobody's Conquest points contribute towards the guild score in their first week of joining, so it's literally impossible for any guild to score points this week. It'll be interesting to see who'll be the first ones to actually launch a guild ship invasion after the next reset.

For now I'm up to level 24, though I'm still not even done with Korriban as a lot of my XP came from doing random things like PvP or joining a world boss group. We killed the world bosses on Dromund Kaas and Balmorra for example and I levelled up twice from the insane XP payouts. The Balmorran world boss also nearly wiped us, because it turns out that a full raid group of piddly dpsers takes a lot of damage and we barely had enough healing going around. Truly, everything's an adventure again.

GS4 Review: Satele Shan & Tulak Hord

I expected the other two servers to be at least a week behind, but in reality it was only a few days, meaning that I actually finished GS4 on all my secondary legacies in the same week. I was kind of impressed by how "in sync" I had kept them without really paying much attention to it.

Satele Shan

My Shadow didn't get too much love this season and was mostly used to complete objectives that benefited from stealth, without making much story progress. Like seemingly everywhere else, I enjoyed spending some time on Empire side, getting my Sniper from ten to 28. I didn't touch my trooper at all this season, though my Guardian gained a few more levels from doing PvP.

I will have to say that trying to get into warzones kind of vexed me this season though. Satele Shan being the west coast server (even if it's "inofficial" now), it's always been a bit tricky for me to find the right time to do group content on it, because 7 pm on the west coast is 2 am my time, so "prime time" was always out. Still, in the past I also used to be able to get pops outside of peak hours, such as when it was early to mid-afternoon over there. This time, though: nothing.

I would sometimes use the /who command to check how much activity there was going on in warzones and could often only find a single match running in the 80s bracket, and sometimes none at all. I had to give up on PvP-related objectives a couple of times because despite of repeated attempts to queue at different times of day on different days I just had no luck whatsoever. This is also why I only got to PvP season rank 3 or so this season. (I forgot that the PvP season was about to end and didn't check my final rank before the UI disappeared, oops.)

Now, from what I've read online I get the impression that Satele Shan players are a bit sensitive to their server being declared "dead" because it seems to happen all too often. While we don't have official population numbers, indicators we do have point towards SS still being bigger than both Tulak Hord and Leviathan combined. There just didn't seem to be that much PvP happening these past couple of months. Did I miss an exodus of PvPers in specific or something? I would be happy to hear from any Satele Shan regulars about what they think.

In terms of personal stats, my Shadow upgraded his gear to item level 333, and my legacy gained five levels, going from 22 to 27.

Tulak Hord

On Tulak Hord, I'm still in the same two-person guild that I joined on a whim during Season 2, and it seems that the other guy also plays kind of on and off, as I noticed that the guild master title had once again reverted to me when I last logged in. However, he also invested in a guild ship this season, so he's clearly been around and busy at some point.

My trooper made a little progress in terms of story and was able to proceed to Tatooine, though I still have the Nar Shaddaa bonus series left to do. My Sorcerer alt hit level 30 and actually got her ship.

Here, too, my legacy advanced by five levels, from 20 to 25, and my trooper's gear rating increased to 332.

Overall, Tulak Hord wasn't my favourite server to spend time on this season, though I couldn't exactly tell you why. I think it's because there was a period of crossover where both my Sage on Leviathan and my Tulak Hord trooper were doing similar content on Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine, and since I usually logged into Leviathan first, the second time round on Tulak Hord then felt repetitive. As an example, I actually bothered to hunt down all the Tatooine datacrons on my Sage this season, which included a ride on the Jawa balloon, something I hadn't done in aaages. But then I thought about doing the same on my trooper and just felt "eh". So she only picked up the Anchorhead datacron so far and the rest will have to come some other time I guess.

GS4 Review: Star Forge & The Leviathan

I haven't made a post to sum up my overall feelings about Galactic Season 4 yet, because I'm still working on completing the reputation track and the last achievements on Darth Malgus, but since I cut back on my aspirations for the other servers this season, hitting level 100 anywhere else means that I'm done there! So I thought I'd do brief little reviews about my different experiences on each server again.

Star Forge

I was kind of surprised when I saw the level 100 achievement pop up on Star Forge first, because I hadn't had the feeling that I'd been pushing much harder there than on the other servers, but I guess it benefitted from the creation of Shintoo for the Galactic Championship. It meant that I suddenly had not just an Imperial alt, but thanks to the boost, one that had access to most of the expansion planets (while my other characters on the other servers are still puttering about in base game content). This made certain weekly objectives much easier and more pleasant to do - yes, I'm the weirdo who'd much rather do one round of Iokath than two rounds of CZ-198.

This meant that Shintoo got way more play than any of my other characters on Star Forge this season, and got to level 80 in the process. I barely touched my smuggler and knight, and only did a minimal amount of questing on my trooper, though the latter did at least increase her gear rating from 328 to 330. (The removal of daily commendations in the last patch helped a lot with that.)

In terms of other numbers, I increased my legacy level from 37 to 40 and earned 7 levels in the PvP season.

At the end of last season I got a couple of offers to park my characters on Star Forge in small personal guilds, both from commenter Pallais and fellow blogger Intisar, and I meant to ask them about that several times but it never happened. The one time I did see Intisar on the fleet and whispered him he must have been AFK. Guys! If you read this, tell me when would be a good time to guild those chars!

The Leviathan

I haven't kept track of the weekly "complete missions as x origin story" objectives, but it felt like knight/warrior got more love in that department than others early this season, so I guess it shouldn't be surprising that I actually managed to make a bit of progress with my Sage knight's class story and completed chapter one. She's now started on Balmorra and we'll see how she gets on with Doc.

I also had some fun advancing my small bounty hunter to level 25. I even gave him and Mako proper matching outfits, something that I very rarely bother to do. I also realised that I hadn't done the Black Talon since its cut scenes received an overhaul several patches ago - hrm, this is one of those things I only ever talked about on Twitter... anyway, seeing the updated camera angles was neat. Somehow I never pictured the Black Talon looking like a Star Destroyer.

In general I'm kind of weirdly excited about levelling another male character. The only other one I currently have is my Shadow on Satele Shan, because for some reason I spent more than a decade being happy playing almost exclusively female characters. I guess I can use SWTOR's second decade to finally check out some of those gender-locked dialogue options that I missed out on until now.

In terms of numbers, my legacy level increased from 19 to 24, I hit level 6 in the PvP season and my Sage's gear rating shot from 326 up to 332. Apparently I've also done a lot more GSF on Leviathan than on the other servers, as it ended up being the first server where I mastered all the different ships on Republic side.

I didn't gain any new insights about playing among the French this season, but I was kind of proud of myself when someone whispered me to ask in French how to start Knights of the Fallen Empire and I was able to string together a coherent answer with the help of Google Translate.

GS3 Review: Star Forge

Galactic Season 3 ends tomorrow, so today I'd like to talk about the last server on which I finished my GS3 goals: Star Forge. Of all my secondary servers, this one has long been the most progressed for the sole reason that I've had a character there for many years that was actually at the level cap during several expansions, even if I didn't really do any endgame with her. As such, Star Forge was the only secondary server where I already had a character hit level 80 during Season 2.

However, with all the new max-levels I've gained on the other servers, it feels like Star Forge is no longer as ahead of the pack as it was, even if my Cathar trooper has marginally better gear than the others, with an average item rating of 328 and being only a few tech fragments away from maxing out her second implant at 334.

That said, my legacy here is still the most advanced by quite a margin (aside from my home server of course), coming in at legacy level 37, and I also did more PvP here than on the other servers, incidentally reaching level seven in the PvP season without trying.

In terms of story I didn't make a lot of progress but that was okay, since my trooper here has been trying to do all the quests just like the one I made on Tulak Hord. She was on Belsavis at the end of the last season, and made it about halfway through Voss this time around. I did the Belsavis bonus series for the first time in what felt like forever and boy, did that bring back memories. I was a little confused though that there was one mission I remembered that I couldn't find anymore, the one to stop a Sith from escaping on a shuttle. Wonder what happened to that and why anything happened to it in the first place, assuming I wasn't just being blind.

I also ended up soloing Kuat Drive Yards at one point (though I don't remember how that tied into seasons, having to complete missions as a trooper perhaps) and ran into a massive wall by getting Station Guardian One at the end, who must have killed me a dozen times before I managed to got him down. I wasn't sure whether he was soloable at all as I couldn't find any evidence of it online, but well, now I know that he is. I'll have to upload the recording I made of it to my YouTube channel at some point.

My other two characters on the server, a Gunslinger smuggler and a Shadow knight, didn't see much play this season, though the smuggler did make some progress on her class story, and seeing how she didn't do all the side missions, it felt rather weird when I realised that she had almost caught up to the trooper in terms of story progression. I guess completing chapter two on her was notable in so far as it made Star Forge the first of my secondary servers on which I have access to two of the legacy class buffs instead of just the one.

GS3 Review: Satele Shan

I've given my general thoughts on Galactic Season 3, but I also wanted to write more specifically about my experiences completing it on all servers again. Part of what has made this project so appealing to me is being able to observe different server communities; another has been re-experiencing a bit of that newbie life, in the sense of not having a max-level legacy with all the perks maxed out and actually being able to benefit from things like picking up datacrons.

I thought I'd start with Satele Shan, which is the first server on which I finished the 100 weekly objectives achievement (outside of my home on Darth Malgus that is), even if the other servers were only days behind.

My main on Satele Shan is my Shadow consular Zilek, who was level 66 by the time I finished Season 2, and on Balmorra in terms of his class story. He hit max-level during Season 3 and progressed up to Hoth story-wise. He also accumulated what I felt was a decent amount of gear, considering that gearing up wasn't really a goal I was actively pursuing - I just went to buy upgrades and trade in currency whenever I got close to hitting some kind of cap. At the time of writing this he's got an average item rating of 328, which is also the level of both of his legendary implants.

I made no effort to make any progress in the PvP season on servers other than Darth Malgus, but it kind of happened automatically as I did some warzones for weekly objectives for the regular season sometimes, which got me up to PvP season level four on Satele Shan. In general I wasn't too excited about PvPing on Zilek though - while he was still levelling, being an Infiltration Shadow felt pretty OP sometimes, but the closer I got to the level cap the weaker I started to feel compared to other specialisations. It was actually much more fun to do a bit of PvP on my lowbie Guardian knight as Focus, a spec I'd never really played before and which made me feel like an absolute monster even as I had no clue what I was doing. However, she recently levelled up into the midbie bracket, and it doesn't feel great to play anything at the low end of that bracket either.

Aside from that bit of PvP I didn't do much on the Guardian except for a few missions when there was a weekly objective that demanded I play a knight and I think she only gained a couple of levels. While they are still small, it felt like I made more progress dusting off my ancient agent and trooper, with the former getting to level ten and the latter to fifteen. My overall legacy level is also up to 22 and I was kind of surprised that I found myself even caring about that, but there are actually perks that you can't unlock with credits until you've hit a certain minimum legacy level, something I don't recall ever running up against on Darth Malgus back in the day, probably because I levelled more quickly than Bioware actually added new perks.

Finally, I noted in my Season 2 in review post that I had joined a guild that had invited me randomly and that felt quite organised. I had a hunch that they wouldn't keep me around for long once the season ended and I became inactive for a while, and this assumption was proved correct as I logged in at the start of Season 3 to find my characters unguilded again.

Ironically, I received a generic recruitment whisper from the exact same guild within days of starting to play again, but this time I didn't respond to it. I could've benefited from the guild perks again, which certainly would've made Conquest easier as well as earning me extra rewards, but I'm just not a fan of such a purely utilitarian approach when it comes to guilds. They would've just kicked me again as soon as I stopped logging in and somehow that didn't sit right with me on an emotional level, even though I completely understand it from a purely practical point of view.

Alts and Endgame

This week, I took some time to review the state of my alt stable on Darth Malgus. Nine months after Legacy of the Sith raised the level cap, I've got fourteen characters at level 80. You might consider that a lot or not, but to me it feels rather low, considering that I had twice as many characters at the old level cap and the expansion only added five more levels.

I think there are several different reasons for this. One that I already mentioned previously is that levelling from 75 to 80 can be relatively slow by SWTOR's standards, unless you're all caught up with the current story or like to spend an hour or two cheesing the penultimate boss in Nathema. Some avenues for levelling that were available in the past have also been closed off. As someone who spends a lot of her time in flashpoints and operations with guildies, I used to just take my close-to-max level characters along to social runs of master mode flashpoints or story mode operations, but both of these are now unavailable until you actually hit the level cap (presumably for the sake of pugs who hated having non-max level players along). If I had a penny for every time I've looked at my selection of alts to pick one for a group activity and found myself thinking "oh yes, that one", just to then realise that the character in question wasn't 80 yet and therefore couldn't come...

In a lot of content that you can access at lower levels, such as daily zones, certain rewards such as the daily currency are also unavailable if the character doing the content isn't 80 yet. This has often pushed me towards playing my existing 80s for the rewards rather than spending time on getting more characters to the level cap.

The way you gear alts nowadays has also felt somewhat clunky to me. I wouldn't say it's alt-unfriendly (I did still level and gear fourteen of them after all) but it just feels less smooth. Onslaught's loot showers that were always based on your existing item rating (and where hitting the maximum was easy to achieve) made it very easy to gear alts as you could just throw some of the excess into your legacy bank and pull out a full gear set on any new alt as soon as it hit the level cap. Gearing that way was obviously not going to be 100% optimised, what with missing augments etc., but it was pretty solid for how easy it was.

In 7.0, the way you could only upgrade your gear to item level 330 via master mode operations made it kind of awkward to do the same, as just getting your gear up to that level took a lot more time. And once you got there, more 330 drops could only be acquired by continuing to kill master mode bosses (whose loot drops were scarce when compared to 6.0), meaning it wasn't easy to get a full set of gear, what with all loot being randomised fixed-stat items with no mods. Plus there was a certain incentive to dissemble the gear for more ops currency at times because if you wanted weapons for your alts for example they had to go through a whole chain of upgrades as well.

I initially tried to save up gear for my alts the same way I had done in Onslaught, but it was just awkward to end up with six pairs of gloves and no chest pieces for example. Plus because I wasn't generally taking my alts into master mode ops, they themselves could only contribute non-Rakata gear to the overall gear pool (which only went up to 326 max).

With 7.1 Bioware added a gear vendor on the fleet, who - once unlocked - sells you 330 mods that you can send to all your alts. Easy, right? Well... easi-er I guess, but still clunky as the unlock is not account-wide, so you either need to do it multiple times or do all your shopping on one character who then has to mail dozens of mods around your legacy, eight letter attachments at a time.

Also, I hope you've got suitable moddable gear on all your alts to put all those mods in! I mean, armour sets and weapons are straightforward enough, but if I put you on the spot right now and asked you where to get a moddable generator for example, would you know? (I asked my guildies and they pointed me to the adaptive gear vendor in the supplies section of the fleet, next to the level 10 mod vendor. That one's actually very affordable, but you've got to know about it.)

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the legendary implants yet! At first I thought the little mission to unlock them after hitting level 80, asking you to gather "activity points", was quite cute, but after the tenth time it becomes a bit of a chore to be perfectly honest, just to be able to access the implant vendor. It's all... not terrible, but just noticeably more clunky than back in Onslaught and I've got to admit I'm not loving it.

If you're a certain type of raider, you might wonder why I bother to get any gear for my alts at all - since it's all legacy-bound, many of my guildies just operate with a single gear set (plus weapons for different combat styles and such) that they constantly shuttle back and forth between all their alts. The reason I don't do that is that I simply find it annoying. It feels dumb from an immersion point of view to effectively strip all your characters bar one naked most of the time, and it's annoying to always have to wait for people to send their gear back and forth (never mind the inevitable delays when someone can't find their Tactical of whatever), especially when all you're doing is a story mode where you really don't need to be wearing gear that is 100% optimised. I'm a bit more sympathetic when it comes to progression.

Either way I kind of find myself missing the simplicity of Onslaught's gearing, and being able to ease characters into endgame more gradually instead of having to hit max-level first. I know there've been other times in the game's life when gearing was more convoluted and even less alt-friendly than it is now, but that was so long ago now. The ease of 6.0 is still much fresher on my mind and easy to miss.

Currency Confusion

When was the last time you participated in one of the recurring world events (Bounty Contract Week, Rakghoul Resurgence etc.)? Personally, since I tend to binge on every new event when it first comes out to max out my reputation and earn all the rewards that interest me right away, I tend to not go back to them that often.

The other week however I did, and learned to my surprise that the world events have been touched by Onslaught in an undocumented way as well - undocumented and very weird.

You see, all of these events tend to have one or two event currencies that are usually legacy-bound (there are some exceptions). And when I say currency here, I mean actual items that go into your inventory. Yes, it would have been more convenient to have them be part of the currency tab, but at the same time I personally didn't think that this system was too bad. It was just one more thing to store in your legacy cargo bay.

With Onslaught though, something odd happened. The old currency tokens still exist as they were, but any new ones you earn go into your currency tab - hurray! However, that currency is bound to that specific character, not legacy-wide. Oh no! Except... you can go to the vendor and spend this character-bound currency to buy a new token which goes into your inventory and can be traded across your legacy again. These new tokens can't be used to actually buy anything though; you always have to go to a vendor and convert it to the character-bound currency first before you can purchase anything.

Confused yet? I can't even begin to imagine what purpose this was supposed to serve. My best theory is that some new programmer was told to convert all the event tokens into a currency, but they didn't realise it was supposed to be legacy-wide currency and made it character currency instead. Then someone more senior noticed the mistake at the last moment, but in the mysterious ways of code, changing the entire thing to a legacy currency on such short notice actually would have been more difficult than adding a new legacy-wide token to the vendor that you can buy and sell with the character currency.
Sounds convoluted and far-fetched? For sure, but I just can't picture anyone intentionally coming up with the weirdness we have now.

Worse, as I said at the start, there used to be some exceptions to the legacy-bound rule... for example Bounty Brokers Association contracts were actually tradeable between players (mercenary as bounty hunters are), so some people basically only gathered them to sell, and others bought them to save themselves from having to do dozens of repeatable quests to buy a reputation reward. Under the new system the contracts are bound though and that whole mini-ecosystem has been destroyed.

It's all very strange and I'd love to hear some kind of official statement from Bioware what this change was all about. I know that these events are probably only a minority pursuit on a grand scale, but it's still strange to see this sudden convoluted mess.

Reaping the Spoils of War

I'm a bit hesitant to pass judgement on a new gearing system after less than a week of dealing with it, mostly because I actually remember my first week of Galactic Command being decent fun too, even if my enjoyment dropped off rapidly after that. That "new feature glow" combined with the generally happy buzz surrounding the release of a new expansion probably does a good job of covering up many flaws in the beginning.

That said... I do feel confident in saying that Spoils of War already feels a lot less scary and confusing than I thought it was on the PTS.

Basically, the first step you have to take is to work on very straightforward vertical progression up to item rating 306, which is the current maximum. It feels safe to say that there's no reason to care about amplifiers at all before you get there, and if you happen to pick up any set bonus gear, just stow it away for later.

Almost everything seems to be personal loot now, and yours is based on your character's average item rating, so your number one priority is to ensure that this is always as high as possible, regardless of whether the stats on said gear are actually good for you. (I shamefully wore a pair of bracers with defense on them for a few hours because they were higher level than what I was wearing at the time and it helped to boost my average.)

Work in progress.

So if your current item rating is 272 for example, your personal loot drops will all be in a narrow range around that, say 268 to 274. By equipping every 274 piece that drops you slowly raise your average item rating, meaning that the range for potential loot also slowly climbs upwards, and so on and so forth, until you reach the cap.

Then you can start mixing and matching the max-level gear you actually want to keep and start including items with set bonuses. (As set bonuses are now bound to armour shells again, you can save the ones you got with lower item ratings and then just replace the modifications in them with higher level ones.)

At that point you can start building sets for different purposes, and also have a think about what sort of amplifiers you would like to have on them. (While it's a bit like playing slot machine, you can always re-roll the amplifiers on a given piece of gear, if you do want to bother.) Theoretically. I'm not actually up to that stage myself yet.

One thing that Spoils of War has in common with Galactic Command is that you're meant to be able to gear up from "playing your way", by taking part in pretty much any activity in the game. Just like with Galactic Command, this is technically true, but doesn't feel very well-balanced yet at this point.

The first couple of days, when all I was doing were dailies and the new operation on story mode, progress felt pretty slow, but ever since I was tipped off that master mode flashpoints were the place to be right now, things have sped up a lot.

Flashpoint bosses are such loot piñatas at the moment that we've already got used to having a mini break after each one to sort out what loot to equip and which of the many gear drops to disintegrate - after all, raising your item rating now might already result in the next boss dropping something better. I'm not at 306 yet, but getting there, and some of my guildies have already achieved that particular milestone.

It does feel a bit grindy even so, and if I had to go through this whole shebang on every single one of my alts I wouldn't find it very appealing... but the nice thing is that since all loot is legacy-bound now, you only have to go through the grind in its entirety once - after that you can send your full set of 306 to your alt and let them run around in it for a while so they'll instantly be able to collect their own set of 306 gear without having to grind their way through 40 levels of item rating first.

I can't say I mind master mode flashpoints being the current flavour of the month to do this, seeing how I've always enjoyed them, but I very much expect Bioware to still do some rebalancing to make some of the other activities a bit more rewarding, just like they had to do in the early days of Galactic Command.

When You (Can't) Go Back

Bhagpuss, MMORPG connoisseur extraordinaire, has decided to give SWTOR a try at long last and has been busy pushing out first impressions posts pretty much every day since. I've very much enjoyed reading them so far because Bhag's opinions are always well-articulated and often somewhat different from the mainstream, which makes them extra interesting. As an unabashed fan of the game, I've also been pleased by how much he's been enjoying it so far, especially as I didn't expect it to be his cup of tea at all. He himself has expressed surprise at how entertaining certain features have turned out to be when he didn't really expect to like them very much at all.

Seeing all this talk about and screenshots of starter planets made me wistful for my own days as a newbie. Of course you can't go back to that, but you can always roll up a new alt, right? Well... there's that "alt creation fatigue" I've been talking about in previous posts to consider though. What to do?

I eventually compromised by firing up the character selection screen of the Satele Shan server, where for some reason I have no less than four characters, none of which had even hit level ten or chosen an advanced class. There's Shintar the Mirialan trooper who I believe I originally created out of a desire to play with Redbeard, though I wouldn't swear that this was my motivation at the time. I tried to go dark side on her though and quickly found myself disliking the character (never good for an alt that shares your main's name).

Then there's a human Jedi consular, the only male character I ever created. I'm not sure now why I created him on an American server... maybe I knew that I'd struggle with connecting with a male character and didn't want this to "taint" my regular legacy?

Then there's the agent I created back in the day when Mr Commando and I were at the peak of our desire to level characters together and found that our regular server was down one evening, while a US server was up, so we decided to go there instead. We made it to level three (back when that took more than three minutes) before our regular server came back up and we dropped our new agents like hot potatoes, never to return.

And then there's the Togruta I talked about creating in this post from nearly four years ago - I levelled her to four and then never touched her again.

After carefully considering my options I decided that the Togruta knight would be the most fun to start up again... mostly because I had an outfit idea for her. (The outfit designer has made me so shallow.) I chose the option to turn her into a Guardian and off I went.

The best thing about playing on Satele Shan was that I had no legacy there; I only got to create it once I reached Coruscant. (In fact, I somehow managed to completely miss the legacy creation prompt; it was only because I found myself thinking "Shouldn't I have a legacy by now?" that I checked the icon in the top bar and there it was, flashing at me to choose my legacy name.) Legacy is a great system in many ways, but I have to admit that as a long-time player I also see it as a downside sometimes that you can't ever truly feel like you're starting over because thanks to your legacy you already own all the datacrons, all the class buffs and more, and have a bank full of materials at your disposal.

It feels like it's been forever since I bothered to hunt for the classic datacrons for example. The ones on Tython were easy enough to remember, as was the first one on Coruscant, but in the Black Sun territory something funny happened: I looked a the map and thought "I really can't remember where the datacron is here..." but then just set out to explore the map as I normally would. And what do you know, as I was picking up some archaeology crystals in a corner, I suddenly looked at the stack of containers next to me and knew that this was it. I couldn't remember where to go exactly; I just knew that I could and should continue climbing up those containers until I could reach a pipe, and then I just kept intuitively putting one foot in front of the other until the datacron was mine. The memories!

I also had fun working on my crew skills. I actually had a use for those rubat crystals and got excited to find gathering nodes around the district!

While on the fleet I purchased the Coruscant stronghold. It's still my favourite, but on Darth Malgus I've pretty much got it as I like it and have no particular desire to make any big changes. I was kind of surprised to find it only costing seven credits - to be honest that immediately made me think that this must have been a special put in place for the game's seventh birthday back in December and that nobody remembered to revert the price afterwards. Not that I minded or think that it should be particularly expensive, but seven credits felt like an insanely good (and oddly priced) bargain.

The one thing that put a bit of a downer on things again was the insane ease of combat and levelling speed. I found it very striking that Bhagpuss noted that he hadn't bothered to learn more than four skills on his smuggler because what was the point? I of course trained everything the game would let me, remembering the good old days when this was actually a useful if not required thing to do because enemies didn't all die in two hits. I also tried setting T7 to dps for a bit but eventually just sent him away entirely whenever I wasn't about to do a story cut scene. While on my own this allowed me to use a few abilities at least while fighting in a heroic area, even if the mobs still didn't manage to get me to half health before dying.

And then there's the levelling speed... as I said the Guardian started at level four, but only a couple of hours of play later I was already in my thirties and still not even halfway through Coruscant. Originally you were meant to be around level twelve around this part of the story. I suppose I haven't been helping myself by choosing to do this thing just as Bioware launched another double XP event, but it still makes me itchy. How can you enjoy playing a lowbie if the game doesn't allow you to be a lowbie for more than a couple of hours?

Maybe this is another thing that's making me shy away from creating more alts: I'm actually not sure I would find the low-level gameplay engaging enough to hang around if I came to the game as a new player now, and seeing the sheer OP-ness of every new alt just reminds me of the unease I feel about current levelling and kind of makes me miss the way things used to be pre-4.0.

Multitasking

I don't know if it's just a side effect of having played this game for more than six years and therefore not finding everything quite as engaging anymore or also a function of the way modern life has generally shortened our attention spans, but I'm finding it hard these days to just be happy doing a single thing while playing.

I always want to watch or at least listen to something on my second monitor at the same time, or alternatively I want to at the very least feel that whatever it is I'm doing and focusing my attention on will kill three birds with one stone (no, two is not enough).

For example, I'm enjoying another stint on the Ebon Hawk Star Forge right now, working on my Commando there. Those play sessions are satisfying because they tick a lot of boxes:

- I get to slowly chip away at my main goal of revisiting all the side quests on Republic side.
- If any of them catch my attention in particular, I can record them and add them to my "Favourite Side Quest" playlist (which is a sort of related side project).
- I get to complete the trooper story for a third time. Not a high priority, but might as well while I'm there...
- I get to play without the support of my max-level legacy. Intriguing!
- What's life like with Galactic Command when you don't have/use any of the boosts and just putter along doing quests every so often? Interesting to see.
- A low level legacy means that there are achievements to be had everywhere!
- ... and datacrons to hunt! I used to get my fix for that on the Progenitor but since that has been merged into Darth Malgus, doing them on yet another server is the only way to keep re-experiencing those jumping puzzles in a meaningful way.
- And with all that, I still get to watch things on my second monitor as well... I just pause the video every so often whenever I visit a quest hub, but I can continue watching while cruising around and killing ten womp rats.

Plus, every so often you get to relive fond memories, such as when running into this champion who actually still hits quite hard even to this day.

Now, it doesn't always have to be quite this much. Other times I will settle for something like PvPing on my agent because:

- PvP is fun.
- It gains her Command ranks and she's not 300 yet.
- It's PvP bonus day or we're in a light side victory state, so I'm feeling extra efficient.

Still, always wanting everything to be contributing towards several goals at once is quite a tall order. It's made me wonder whether this isn't the real reason I struggle so much with replaying KotFE & KotET. When I set myself the goal to complete veteran mode KotFE for example, I went through the entire sixteen chapters in a flash! Having more than one thing to work towards was fun. However, the rest of the time those chapters are pretty much the antithesis to my desire to multitask:

- The way combat and dialogue alternate quickly and frequently is very immersive the first time around but doesn't play so well with watching something else on my second screen because I need to start and stop all the time.
- Unless you're making a point of speed-running by skipping cut scenes etc., they aren't a great source of XP or CXP either.
- Beyond seeing the story and how different choices play out (which is fun two or three times) there just isn't... anything. You don't get any good loot, there is little to no room to go off the beaten path for a bit and do something else, there's no reputation to earn, no achievements for killing 100/500/1000 skytroopers... welp, I can't believe I just suggested that as an addition to make chapter replays a bit more interesting.

Don't tell me to go play something else instead though - I like my comfort food! I just really have an urge to be efficient about it at the same time.